Here’s why: Publicly funded science is in trouble–at least in the United States. As io9.com reports in its awareness-raising “Public Science Triumphs” campaign, Congress is about to slash $1.3 trillion from the U.S. budget, with agencies like the National Science Foundation, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and National Institutes of Health all lined up for the guillotine. When laypeople don’t know or care enough about what scientists are doing with that money, they don’t notice or care when scientists are suddenly prevented from doing it.

Yes, researchers are people too, with idiots and ass-coverers among them–and whether or not public funds are a good thing for science is a healthy debate to have. But in order to have healthy debate you must have attention. This isn’t the 1950s, when public support of scientific research could be drummed up at the drop of a hat by invoking “we gotta beat dem Commies, gosh durnit!” Our enemies now are slow-motion catastrophes like climate change and epidemiologic threats from countries no one in the West could find on a map. And for inspiration, we can’t just look to shiny rockets aimed at the man in the moon–we have to interpret indistinct blobs of false-color spectrometry. It’s not that the public is incapable of caring about these problems or finding these discoveries fascinating. They–we–just need some help.